More Of My Favorite Firefox Plugins

Last week, I gave a beginner’s guide to the SEO Quake plugin for Firefox along with sharing what I liked about it, etc. This week, I’m going to give you some more of my favorite Firefox plugins. In no particular order:

1. The MozBar. This is another SEO plugin that has a couple of nice features, especially if you’re an SEOMoz member.

• First, it will tell you a page’s MozRank and MozTrust ratings. MozRank and MozTrust are proprietary search rankings very similar to Google’s PageRank. Without going into a lot of details, SEOMoz’s ranking systems seem likely to become the new standard in the SEO community.
• Next, it has a nice “analyze page” button that will show you some simple SEO details for any page.
• Last, it has a “show nofollows” button that will highlight any nofollow links in ‘pink.’ If you’re not sure what a “nofollow” link is, check this out.

2. ScreenGrab. Need to send someone a screenshot? This is a decent little plugin for capturing an image of an entire web page or a section of a webpage. I use it all the time.

3. FireBug. This little plugin has changed my life. If you ever have to edit HTML and/or CSS, especially on a live website, this add-on is worth paying a pretty penny for. Amazingly, it’s completely free.

4. DownThemAll! This is a nice extension for downloading really big files. It can prioritize files, you can manage the resources this plugin uses (so it can run in the background), and it really speeds up downloads. If you find yourself regularly downloading big files, you’ll love this plugin.

5. SEOBook Rank Checker. This is great for tracking changes in organic rankings – especially if you want to check a lot at once. I have a few excel spreadsheets worth of keywords to check on a regular basis, and this plugin does it very fast.

6. YSlow. If you’re a web designer, of if you’re a website geek just trying to make your site faster, Yslow is an essential addition to Firebug. It’s not completely perfect, but it does a good job of telling you how to increase the performance of your site by paying attention to a lot of commonly ignored server rules. It’s not a tool for beginners, but if you consider yourself a webmaster then you need this plugin.

7. Smush.it (included with YSlow). This is another cool plugin for making your site go faster. Basically, Smush.it downloads all your images and then figures out how to re-compress them so that the files are smaller, but it doesn’t compromise looks. That’s called “lossless compression” in geek-speak.

8. TinEye. This is a neat add-on that I found out about through Ann Smarty. It doesn’t do a great job (it’s admittedly limited), but if you’re looking for a larger version of the same image, or if you’re trying to see if someone is copying your images, you might want it.

9. FireFTP. The plugin that compelled me to make this list. Basically, FireFTP is the best FTP client I’ve ever used. HIGHLY recommended.

Anyone want to add to my list? Hit me below!